The season of dark rooms and pale skin

Everybody gets a little layer of pudge around this time, right? For most people that thermal layer would be built up from a pleasent blend of sweet potatoes and cranberries, gravy and chocolate. It's a little different for me. I wouldn't be surprised if my skin gives off a neon yellow glow that makes me visible in the dark from the amount of artificial butter-flavored salt and grease in my system by the end of January.
It's the season of good movies.
I'm from a family of serious movie watchers. We can't go on a tropical vacation for more than four days without bonding in silence for a couple hours in the refrigerated air of a theater. In my nerdiest days, if I was stuck at home with nothing to do on a Friday night, going to a movie with my parents was a way to get out while still avoiding the awkwardness of my dad's silence and the pain of my mom's repeated, epic stories of couch shopping trips gone awry and christmas card debacles.
I spend a lot more time in the fresh air now. But this is the season when I revert to light-enhanced hibernation. Good movies in the summer come at the measured rate of billboards on a Nebraska blue highway. Then all of a sudden, come November, you're in Hong Kong, one light show stacked on top of the other.
It's almost more than I can handle. By the way, when's somebody going to see the light and open another art house in this town? Buffalo's got three! Based on the lines at the Charles right now, there's clearly enough sociology professors and musicians to fill up another indie theater. And the Rotunda don't count. That's just a velvet lined casket where 1st run movies from the Senator go to die. But oh that velvet - and real butter on the popcorn.
So a note on what I look for in awards season: I like flawed masterpieces. I like movies that go so far out on the edge, push the pedal so hard they start burning oil or pop a flat. The Cohen Brothers do it all the time. Jim Jarmusch too. It's one reason why A.I. might be my favorite movie of all time. I won't go into critical detail, but I love how that movie did so much and then ran right off the track at the end, at least to most people I talked to. I thought the ending was great, but it was still completely off-kilter. Sometimes the mistakes in a great, broken movie are a pea under 50 matresses, and the fun is mentally peeling the layers back to find the offending pebble. With Walk the LIne tonight, and the Squid and the Whale next week, I already get the sense I'm going to feel like a spoiled movie princess this year.